The National Work–Life Balance Index©: The European Case

Prior research has shown the existence of both family-to-work conflict (FWC) and work-to-family conflict (WFC). In this paper we do not focus on this difference, and we refer to the work–life balance that could go either way. See Hill et al. (2001), Grzywacz and Carlson (2007) and McGinnity and Whelan (2009) for a review of the concept of work–life balance and its measurement.

The inclusion of subjective indicators may be problematic as they may be endogenous to the Index. We have alternatively computed the Index including the variables “Level of difficulty to concentrate at work due to family responsibilities”, “Level of tiredness to do household chores”, “Level of stress due to work–life balance”, and “Satisfaction with life” as they may be endogenous. Information on these variables is obtained from EUROFOUND (2012) and results are available upon request. After computing the five components and the Index, the variables “Level of difficulty to concentrate at work due to family responsibilities”, “Level of tiredness to do household chores”, and “Level of stress due to work–life balance” have a negative correlation (e.g., −0.6351, −0.4798 and −0.6447 respectively) with the component “Health”, while the question “Satisfaction with life” has a positive correlation (e.g., 0.5641) with this component.

We have not analyzed the internal consistency of the component “Health” given that the 2 variables included in that component come from the same survey (EUROFOUND 2012a, b) and refer to the distribution of time of the sample. When we alternatively include subjective variables as described in footnote 2, the internal consistency of the component “Health” is α = 0.80, while the internal consistency of the Index is α = 0.74.

It may appear surprising that higher participation in child care activities is related to a lower work–life balance, while a higher participation in chores is related to a higher work–life balance. The intuition here is that while outsourced chore activities may be of equal or better quality than activities done by the individuals, parents may be more reluctant to outsource childcare activities (Guryan et al. 2008) as childcare by parents has been shown to be very important in child development (Leibowitz 1972, 1974, 1977). Thus, while individuals may have a certain degree of choice for chores activities, it may not be the case for childcare activities. Consequently, higher participation in chores may indicate that individuals have more available time and thus they devote more time to these activities because they want to, which is related to a lower conflict between work and household responsibilities. However, parents may feel that childcare is their responsibility as they have to do these child care activities, and thus higher participation in childcare activities imposes more restrictions on their daily lives, leading to higher participation in these activities being related to a higher conflict between work and family life.